£10.50–£11.80, Booths, Waitrose, Davy's Wine, Tanners Wine, The Wine Shop (Knaresborough) I'd like to think that my venture into mouthwatering dry Riesling for last week's wine lifted the putative winter gloom. It certainly did nothing to improve the weather, so this week I'm back with a full-on winter red, although that doesn't mean it's not suitable for summer. It's an excellent barbecue red, but it's a bit cruel to mention summer and barbecues in current conditions. Altano

£17.99, Novel Wines A rich, velvety, fruity and spicy red – a perfect winter warmer to enjoy by the fire or tucking into cassoulet, lamb shanks, duck, steak, jacket potatoes or root vegetables. So far, not so out of the ordinary, but everything else about Purcari's Freedom Blend is emphatically out of the ordinary. It's not just that we don't see wines made from Bastardo, Saperavi or Rara Neagra very often, or that Moldova is hardly a big thing in wine in the UK (although Mol

£8.50, The Wine Society I’ve been following this delicious unoaked white from the outset and each vintage more than lives up to its predecessor, the 2016 combining candied citrus fruit and grapefruit zest with the Douro’s characteristic smoky, stony, mineral flavour. It's a blend of local varieties, including Malvasia Fina and Moscatel Galego, from vineyards high up in the Douro Valley belonging to the Symingtons, a remarkable family who own 26 individual wine estates and Gra

£9.95, The Wine Society Red wines from Languedoc can be pretty big and burly, especially when the grape blend includes, as this does, a fair amount of Carignan, but there’s no suggestion of burliness or rusticity here. Instead, it delivers a mouthful of red berry and praline-smooth flavours and a juicy, refreshing finish, all for under a tenner. The clue to the freshness and elegance is in the name. Rouquette On Sea isn’t a case of poetic licence-cum-wishful thinking: the vin